


part time lover (and a full time friend)

by moodyreindeer



Series: the start of something good [1]
Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-03 23:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11542221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodyreindeer/pseuds/moodyreindeer
Summary: Peter needs some assistance, and maybe Michelle is okay with the whole domesticity thing.





	part time lover (and a full time friend)

**Author's Note:**

> i love my strong, independent black daughter and her adorable spidey nerd boyfriend.
> 
> title from 'anyone else but you' by the moldy peaches.

He’s leaning against her door, mask drooping from his hands, his suit pale with ash and plaster dust, and Michelle can only think _of course it’s Peter Parker underneath that stupid mask._

She has the inappropriate urge to gloat, but words dissolve in her throat when Peter looks at her with eyes that can only be described as devastated.

“You lived nearby,” Peter states in a voice scraped raw. He lifts his hand and limply waves in the direction of the implied catastrophe.

Michelle nods. She drinks in the hunch of his shoulders and the exhausted gape of his mouth. Has Peter Parker always looked so old?

“Is something broken?” She practically forces herself to ask, because this not what her night is supposed to look like. Michelle is supposed to be curled up on the couch with her most recent book, mood-appropriate music playing as she basks in the glory of having a rare night to herself. No mother, no sister, no broken boys slumped outside her door.

He shakes his head once, the minute act requiring too much energy.

“Okay, then,” she says, then pulls him inside.

Michelle can count all the times she’s had friends over on one hand. The most recent one took place over winter break when she called for an impromptu decathlon meeting because god knows no one would study over break without her giving them a push. Peter had been mildly awestruck, looking around her house as if she lived on the moon instead of a decent suburbs in Queens. It’s hard to remember that this is that same awed boy as she drags his limp body through the halls.

She disposes of him on the toilet. He gratefully takes his weight off his legs and curls to one side, mask still loosely gripped in one hand.

Michelle looks around the bathroom, searching for a clue of what to do next. Other than the cloud of debris stuck to his suit, nothing appears to have punctured or cut through the material. Michelle is, on one hand, relieved that she doesn’t have to dust off her rusty first-aid skills. On the other hand, piecing someone back together emotionally is a lot harder and very much outside her wide range of talents.

Finally, she gets it. Michelle goes to the tub and turns on the faucet. She makes sure the water remains just below scalding and once the tub is filled halfway, she shuts the water off.

“Take your suit off.”

Peter lifts his head enough to blink at her. “What?”

Michelle points to the water, then at his suit. “Suit. Off. You smell like the inside of a dirty chimney.”

Groggily he pulls himself up. He tosses his mask on the sink and taps the center of his chest. The suit pools to the floor and Michelle politely casts her eyes over his shoulder as he steps into the water.

He curls up almost instantly, sloshing water as he pulls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them. Peter sits still long enough that Michelle grabs the soap and shampoo for him, leaving them on edge of the tub as she picks up his suit and slips from the room.

She lays out the suit on the kitchen counter, grabs a washcloth and a bottle of dish soap, then freezes, because _what the fuck is she even doing?_

Never mind the fact that Michelle doesn’t know the first thing about cleaning a high-tech super suit, she is the absolute last person anyone should run to when they’re war-weary and about to crack from the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Michelle is not a people-person. She has her mother, her sister, and that’s all she needs, really. She has the decathlon team, and she calls them friends, sure, but she thinks people are best kept at an arm’s length. She can barely account for her own emotions without bringing someone else’s into the equation.

And this is _Peter Parker_. The same boy who loves band for five years then mysteriously drops out with no explanation. The same boy who would never forgive another teammate for bailing on decathalon nationals last-minute. The same boy who swings around Queens shooting spider webs at bad guys.

If Michelle thought Peter Parker was a complex puzzle before she saw him in the suit, there aren’t enough words to describe what she thinks of him now.

It was hard enough to silently stew over emotions for a boy without knowing if it’s just her lusty, unbalanced hormones trying to find an outlet in the nearest good-looking person or if these foreign emotions have some genuine merit to them. The regular angsty teenage bullshit was enough to deal with - now it has _superpowers._

Peter in himself is an entirely different universe, one that exists outside Michelle’s capabilities.

What doesn’t exist outside her capabilities, however, is the ability to clean some goddamn fabric, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to let this elaborate _toy_ get the best of her.

She brushes what doesn’t cling to the material off first before cautiously dabbing the suit with the damp cloth. Michelle foregoes soap altogether - the last thing she needs is to be responsible for an unsolved crisis because she filled Spider-Man’s suit with _suds._

Once the suit is as clean as she can possibly get it, Michelle hangs it over a chair to dry. Then, she goes to check on Peter.

He’s in the same position she left him in, staring at the water blankly.

“Peter?” she asks. She hovers at the threshold with one hand in a vice grip around the doorframe.

“Mm?” he hums noncommittally.

It’s not a _come in_ but it’s also not _go away ,_ so Michelle takes the risk and steps inside.

“Is this what you usually do after you save the city?” she asks because one of them has to say _something_. “Go catatonic until you can come out again?”

Peter shrugs.

“Do you need to talk it out?” Michelle tries again. She ignores the moronic thump of her heart against her ribs as she realizes _fuck_ , Peter actually might be in a bad way here.

He shrugs again.

“Fine,” she decides out loud. “Since you can’t talk about this and I don’t know how to talk about this, no more talking. Okay?” She leaves again, only to return momentarily with her phone in hand.

She’s not sure what the soundtrack to a traumatic aftermath sounds like, so she just puts on the same music she listens to when she needs to feel strong - a playlist of Beyoncé and Rihanna songs that are just slow enough to remind her that powerful women feel vulnerable sometimes, too.

Michelle lets herself take over from there. She lets the water run again as she drenches a sponge in soap, acutely aware that every inch of him is going to smell like her favorite cucumber melon body wash as she makes gentle circles on his shoulders.

Peter remains dutifully still as she washes down his top half, sponging warm water over his shoulders and chest. His face looks so tragic, sullenly aimed upward as she scrubs his neck, that Michelle has to chant _sixteen sixteen sixteen_ in her head to remind herself that this is still the same boy she goes to school with.

He lifts his arms almost on cue so she can scrub his pits and sides; once his top half is clean enough to eat on, she loads the sponge with more soap and stares at a suspiciously bright stain on the towel cabinent as he robotically washes off his legs.

He hands her the sponge once he’s scrubbed the skin of his legs pink. He lets her tilt his head back and squeeze water over his head. Once his hair is thoroughly soaked, Michelle puts the sponge back on the rack and grabs the shampoo.

She scrubs plaster and ash from his hair and watches it turn the bath water murky. The soap foam is gray between her fingers and the amount of wreckage his hair can carry from underneath a mask is astonishing, to say the least. She wants to worry, but Michelle can  practically _hear_ the uneven uptick of his heart as the severity of the night shudders through his body like chill that’s impossible shake. But the last thing this night needs is two teenagers having panic attacks in a bathroom, so she forces herself to calm down and pushes his shoulders down to rinse the shampoo out.

Rihanna serenades them as Michelle conditions and rinses his hair completely clean. From this proximity she can see everything: the cut of his elbows and knees; his long limbs corded with thin muscles; tan skin pulled taut over his lean build.

His body couldn’t have screamed _hero_ any louder without spelling it out in the freckles on his back. Honestly, how could she not have pieced it together sooner?

Michelle can feel the beginning of a bad ache in her knees from the cold tile floor and in her arms from keeping them lifted, but Peter’s skin is marginally less gray than when he appeared at her door so she begrudgingly tells herself the pain is worth it.

The water turns cold again. Michelle reaches into the cloudy water, painfully close to soaking her chest on his knees as she pulls the plug.

“Thank you,” he says. The words are so quiet that she can barely make them out above the gurgle of the draining water.

Michelle nods curtly. “You’re welcome.”

She hands him a towel and turns away as he runs it over his body. She checks the time as she turns the music off.

“You’re not walking home alone at midnight,” she tells him, still turned away. The same predators that lurk in alleyways to prey on girls like her would love to snatch up a baby-faced boy like him. And, really, if anyone is going to protect the friendly neighorhood spider-man, it's going to be her because why the hell not?

He clears his throat; Michelle spins around to the relieving sight of a towel wrapped around his hips.

“I wouldn't want to impose,” he refuses, “more than I already have, that is.”

The uncomfortable way he rubs his neck and the awkward break in his words is close enough to normal that the comfort of it almost brings Michelle to her knees. This awkward, modest human mess is manageable.

“Don’t be stupid.” She waves off anything else he might say with the sharp cut of her hand through the air. Obediently, his mouth closes with an audible click.

Michelle leads him to her room. He stands in the middle of it awkwardly as she fishes some clothes from her dresser. When she turns back to him, his moony stare has returned, albeit a little dimmer than before.

“Enjoying your first time in a girl’s bedroom?”

His cheeks flush as he stumbles to take the clothes from her outstretched hands. “Shut up!” he stutters in an embarrassed yelp. She doesn’t try to hold back her smirk.

“Need anything else?” Michelle asks as she leaves him to change.

“Can you text my aunt for me?” he requests. “Tell her I’m at Ned’s or something.”

She returns to the kitchen and retrieves his phone from a secret pocket she nearly misses. There are several missed calls from his aunt (and a Mr. Stark, which Michelle will _definitely_ be asking him about later) and several texts from Ned loaded with random caps and a copious amount of question marks.

His phone is thankfully - or perhaps stupidly - not password-protected, making it easy for Michelle to send his aunt May _sorry, fell asleep at ned’s. will be home in the morning._

She returns his phone to the same pocket she found it. She hovers in the kitchen a moment longer and busies herself with putting the clean dishes away. She feels the ghost of suds on her hands and tries not to think about the foreign sense of fondness in her chest as she recalls the way Peter looked in the bath. Like a little boy who was told his beloved pet wouldn’t be coming back from the vet's.

Once a considerate amount of time has passed, she goes back to her room and knocks.

“Come in,” he calls. He’s sitting on the bed, hands nervously knotted in his lap.

Michelle leans against the door. Her clothes fit him surprisingly well, even though he’s had to roll the sweats a few time to keep from tripping over them.

A scarcely listened to part of her mind smugly notes that he smells like her and looks good in her clothes. She realizes this isn’t a totally horrifying thought and files that fact away for later analysis.

“It feels weird telling you to come in to your own room,” Peter says, chuckling awkwardly.

“Get used to it,” she shoots back, “you’re sleeping in here.”

He immediately starts to protest again, using a lot of _i couldn’t_ s and _no, really_ s that Michelle disregards as soon they leave his mouth.

“Quit being stupid,” she tells him again. It shuts him up as well as it did the first time. “I was probably going to fall asleep on the couch before you came here, anyway, so someone should use my bed.”

His lips press together in a way that says he wants to argue to issue more, but she loudly calls “Goodnight, Peter!” and forcibly shuts the door behind her.

She once again settles into her crook in the couch and picks up her book.

In the morning, Michelle will wake up hours before Peter and will promptly begin to compile a list of reasons why this one-time occurrence has to stay simply that. She will assure herself that she is not going to be the distressed significant other tending to her partner’s wounds as she watches Channel 3 cover the fire on the morning news. She will eat a bowl of cereal and tell herself that things like love are never serious when you’re sixteen.

For now, she reads her book and tries not to think of the broken boy sleeping in her bed.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hey on my [tumblr](http://spideypetes.tumblr.com).
> 
> like my writing? buy my first book [here!](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1983447617/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1531446109&sr=8-1&keywords=women+of+questionable+morals)


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